Generally for entry level games testing the skills they're looking for are good communication (written and verbal), attention to detail and a lot of enthusiasm for games. Take a look at QA job postings and see what skills, experience and qualifications are necessary.

It's perhaps not a job where being on the bottom rung for too long is going to be a good thing in terms of job security or pay, so it's worth showing the organisational skills and ambition to lead others and move up that way, or move sideways to design or production if that's your bag.

If you're still in full-time education, then probably one of the best things you can do is contact all of the local companies (http://www.gamedevmap.com/ might help) and talk to them about being there for unpaid work experience/holiday work. Experience gained will go a long way.

I guess there are some games QA higher education qualifications, and they might help a bit, but probably no more than any other equivalent qualification you might get, and a games QA qualification might be less transferable to other industries should you decide to get out.

Generally for entry level games testing the skills they're looking for are good communication (written and verbal), attention to detail and a lot of enthusiasm for games. Take a look at QA job postings and see what skills, experience and qualifications are necessary.

It's perhaps not a job where being on the bottom rung for too long is going to be a good thing in terms of job security or pay, so it's worth showing the organisational skills and ambition to lead others and move up that way, or move sideways to design or production if that's your bag.

If you're still in full-time education, then probably one of the best things you can do is contact all of the local companies (http://www.gamedevmap.com/ might help) and talk to them about being there for unpaid work experience/holiday work. Experience gained will go a long way.

I guess there are some games QA higher education qualifications, and they might help a bit, but probably no more than any other equivalent qualification you might get, and a games QA qualification might be less transferable to other industries should you decide to get out.

Games Testing is a different discipline to Programming, Design, Art or Producer roles. Many people see it as a "foot in the door" type job and it really is not (this coming from someone who was a former tester as well as working in programming later in their career).

To be a good tester you need to be able to communicate via bug reports. You will need to be able to find bugs in a game, give steps to reproduce that bug so the development team can fix it and, afterward, be able to check if that bug was fixed.

You do not just Play the game and see what is broken, oftentimes you follow a list of things to test and it can be very boring and tiresome (especially if you are on a large project and have to replay the same level all day, every day for 2 weeks).

I should also mention that many studios do not have a full time testing team and will often retain key people and periodically hire a team of testers when a game reaches a beta stage and they have testing work to assign. For this reason, job security as a tester can be an issue.

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